Viewpoints critical, p.23
Viewpoints Critical, page 23
I pulled the toggles on the inflatable, glancing upslope, trying to ignore the slashes of pain down my back. So far, there hadn't been any Saint choppers out. I could only hope that our scramblers had done the job.
From high overhead came the scream of a scrammer—inbound—and that meant it was one of ours.
"Let's go, before the Saints get back to looking for us." For me, "Saint" was a dirty word.
Lyana gave me a look that suggested I stop talking and start launching our craft.
The inflatable was barely big enough for both of us, but the thin plastreen sheet was a visual blender. At least, the CAF techies said it was. I lifted Lyana onto the inflatable and pushed it out into the shallow brown water. Then I eased myself onto it beside her, on my stomach, and pulled the plastreen up to cover us. It was supposed to be inertly transparent to scanners and to show the images of whatever was around us.
I hoped it worked.
Cuipra
In the darkness caused by the ancient oiled wood of the public room, the captain-colonel looked across the table at the serving girl. "There are no temples or shrines here. Yet they say that the people of the Cuprite Valleys are reverent people."
The girl inclined her head, setting the mug on the table. She did not speak. Her hand brushed the edge of her maiden's bonnet.
"Girl . . . why are there no shrines or temples?" His voice hardened.
"Honored sir ... I am no one who can speak of that. Please ... do not. . .
"I asked an honest question."
The innkeeper stepped forward. "She is my daughter, sir, and I would that you not force an answer. I will take the wrath and answer your question." He eased himself in front of the girl.
She slipped back behind the thin figure of her father, then scurried toward the kitchen.
The captain-colonel laughed. "Your answer, fellow!" "Our God is the unknown, sir. The true One can never be spoken of. He cannot be mentioned. To talk of him is to risk shame, even death." "Even to outsiders? "
"None are outsiders to the true One. None are unknown to him."
The captain-colonel shook his head. "To deny speech about a deity is to admit that such is false. To a great being—or a god—our chatter is petty and meaningless. Find a god who asks for more than fearful silence."
The innkeeper threw himself at the officer, his oiled and sharpened cleaver slashing toward the captain-colonel.
Old Earth
Even in late spring, river water is frigging cold. I tried to keep my boots from dragging in the water under the plastreen, but I was too tall for the inflatable, and my toes were in the water, and with the boots and my legs wet from launching it, I was beginning to shiver. My legs were freezing, and my back was boiled or broiled, or both.
Somewhere I'd lost the slug-thrower, but I didn't remember how.
"Why are we doing this?" I murmured.
Lyana smiled, faintly. "You volunteered."
"In a way. Did I have much choice? The Saints are hammering their way into the far northwest. They've already annexed most of Westana." "There's always a choice."
"Some choice," I muttered. The inflatable swung to one side in the swift, if shallow, currents of the Virgin River. The world turned on its edge for a moment—that was the way it felt.
I squinted, trying to keep my balance on the unsteady surface. It wasn't easy with a back that wasn't working well and the differential between my weight and Lyana's.
There's always a choice. But was there?
The inflatable bucked and slammed into something, and water began to flow over my thighs. Frig! It was cold, and I shivered, and my back spasmed.
After a moment, I eased up the corner of the plastreen. The inflatable was wedged against an outcropping of red stone and branches and had grounded in less than a foot of water.
From overhead came the thwop, thwop, thwop of a Saint chopper.
With the water freezing me, I forced myself to wait until the sounds of the patrol chopper faded away. Then I eased myself off the inflatable, partway, enough to get my boots on the sandy stream bottom and push us away from the outcropping and back out into the main current.
I had to struggle to get back onto the inflatable, and just lay there on my stomach under the plastreen for a time.
"Some choice ..."
Tory
Sitting in the booth didn't provide answers. I got up and walked to the end of the bar. I stood there and looked across at Sean. I realized for the first time that I was a good head taller than he was.
"Sean. You've changed things. Why?"
"I've changed nothing." He frowned. "Do I know you?"
Did he know me? I'd been coming to his pub for over a year, and suddenly he didn't know me?
"You did. Until today, apparently."
He looked across the bar at me. "You've got bigger troubles than that, friend." "Daffyd."
He laughed. "Bigger troubles than a Welshman in an Irish pub, too."
I just wanted to reach across the bar and throttle him. I didn't. I didn't know why, though. "So you don't know me?"
"You seem to think I should." He picked up a cloth and polished a glass, then another, waiting for me to reply.
"You've served me every Friday for over a year."
"Not in this pub, my friend."
"Daffyd."
"Not in this pub, Daffyd. I know my customers. Hell, I know everyone in Trawley's Cross."
"I've been with ReFor ever since I came to Tory."
"ReFor? Oh, the foresting outfit. They made a bid and got turned down. They pulled out a year and a half ago. You with the office in Port Allen?"
Heat and cold ran up and down my spine, and I set the near-empty glass on the bar.
Where was I?
Old Earth
Even without peering from underneath the plastreen, I could tell we were in the lower section of the Gorge. The current was swifter, and we weren't hitting obstacles. Good thing it was spring. Late summer, and there wouldn't have been enough water to float a toy boat. When I did sneak a peek, all I saw was rock, with brush clinging to the thin link of soil between the water's edge and the cliffs.
That was fine with me. I was having even more trouble moving, and my feet were getting numb. I didn't think it was all from the cold river water.
The big problem wasn't the south end of the Gorge, but the open terrain to the south once we floated farther south. We needed to be at least ten klicks beyond the mountains to get a chance at being picked up.
I must have dozed off ... or I kept us going somehow without remembering how.
Lyana was talking to me. Couldn't make out the words at first. "It's time, Daffyd ... it's time." ". . . time?"
"Trigger your beacon ... the active mode ... the one that calls for pickup."
". . . been tracking me . . ." It was getting hard to talk. "Trigger it."
I fumbled the beacon around, hard to do when you're on your stomach sharing an inflatable with someone, and pressed the active pickup button. Hoped that the Saints didn't have that frequency as well.
More riverbank went by, less swiftly.
A faint hum rose into a roar, and that wasn't the sound of a pickup dasher but a Saint strafer. I lay as still as I could under the plastreen. He probably couldn't pick us up visually, and even if he had the beacon freq, he'd only be
able to home in within ten meters. That meant he'd strafe the river around the signal.
The roar got louder.
I could hear something like thunk, chunk, thunk . . . and the inflatable tossed. Something slammed into my shoulder, and I lost my grip with that hand. There was a hissing . . . one of the sections of the inflatable had been punctured . . . but I only had one good hand, and neither leg seemed to want to move.
I waited for another strafing run, not because I wanted to, but because there wasn't anything else I could do.
"You'll be fine," Lyana whispered. "It won't be long, now." " What won't. . . ?"
That was when I heard the scrammer, with the high whine that meant it was one of ours. I thought there was an explosion, but it wasn't the scrammer, because the whine died away.
I could hear the approaching rotors, and the "acknowledge" tone ululated on the beacon. With my good hand, I could barely punch the "confirm" stud and enter my code. Even that hand was getting numb as well.
"Frig . . . hope . . . hope . . ." Couldn't say more.
Lyana handed me a rose, a white rose, folded my numbing fingers around it. Wondered where she'd gotten it. "You'll be fine, just so long as you hold to the rose."
Hold to the rose. Hold to the rose. Kept that thought in mind as the rotor wash blew the plastreen clear of the inflatable. Hold . . .
Tory
"You all right?" Sean peered at me.
"You know, Sean, you're scaring the crap out of me." I glanced down at the wood of the bar. I thumped it. It sounded hard. It felt hard.
"You don't need to fear me." Sean laughed.
"Why is that?" I wasn't sure I wanted to hear his answer.
"The man to fear is the one who troubles your soul. Any fool with a weapon can trouble your life. So can any woman with a smile and a flash of flesh."
I picked up the empty glass, fingering it.
"You are troubling my soul," I pointed out. "There was nothing wrong with anything until I came in here tonight."
"No, friend . . . Daffyd . . . you only thought that there was nothing wrong."
I looked at the glass I held again. Empty. But it was crystal, I thought. Lethe
I found myself standing on a chessboard, a frigging chessboard, sixty-four alternating squares of black marble and pale green marble. I was standing on the back row, in the Queen knight's position. My flight boots were soaked, the water running out of them. The water was black. So were my boots, and so was my flight suit, and even my hands. I wasn't surprised, and I should have been as I looked up.
Around the chessboard was a green boxwood hedge. Light flowed around me from somewhere, and I looked up, but the sky above was a featureless off-white tinted green.
Everything tilted, and I was standing closer to the center of the board, only a square away from a hard-eyed Saint foot-slogger who lifted an antique bayoneted rifle.
Fly, dasher man, where you going to fly to?
The Saint bishop lifted his crosier and pointed it, and slid down a line of blue fire toward me. His voice thundered. "Rationality is but chaos, under which you have flattened all that was great, for none of you have heard God, and each of you believes yourself God of your own world."
I struggled for a reply, and finally dragged words from somewhere. "Belief is its own chaos, and under it, everything dies, for each believer holds his creed to be divine and will kill all others in its name." I twisted somehow, up and over, two squares, then one, coming down like an attack dasher on another Saint foot-slogger. With less than a scream, he vanished. That bothered me, but I didn't have time to think about it.
Another bishop, also in blinding white-green, appeared from somewhere, and his words were fire. "You would heed the mind of the thinker, the ear of the listener, the eye of the beholder, but the beholder is deaf to song, the listener blind to sight, and the thinker locked in the vault of his thoughts . . . and only God knows all."
"Words . . . words are the greatest vanity of the believers, and their gods, for beautiful words are the perfume of confusions." With both bishops bearing down on me, I jumped, like a human dasher, avoiding green and blue flashes of flame.
The first bishop pursued me once more, dispatching another line of blue flame that flared at me. "Repent ye of your unbelief, for there is no other deity before the True God."
I somehow found yet another reply. "A sole true belief for all leads to the stagnation and the frozen chaos of thoughtless conformity, and that is an abomination unto any thinking being, especially unto one who would claim to be God."
Green and white lightning flashed and thundered around me. Old Earth
"Where is she?" My eyes were blurred for a moment, but they focused on the medic who was looking over the edge of the medcradle. "Where am I?" "Benedict Arnold Medical Center, sir."
How had I gotten to Denver? How long had I been out? Lyana? Where was she? "Where is she?"
The medic looked down at me. "Who, Captain? You are Captain David Bellemer?"
"Yes." His face was fading in and out. "Lyana. She was with me." Through all the battles.
"Was she a Saint local who helped you, sir?" "No. She was crew."
"Sir . . . You were badly wounded, and had a smashed collarbone, and shrapnel in one shoulder. No one could understand how you navigated seventy klicks of river in your condition."
"Where's my crew?"
"Sir . . . you were flying a single-seat dasher." The medic smiled indulgently. "The only thing with you was that." He pointed to the table beside the medcradle. "You wouldn't let go of it until we took care of it. I took some time to find crystal. You were most insistent."
In the crystal vase was a perfect white rose on a long stem. It had already rooted, yet the petals were fresh.
The basic theme behind this story had haunted me for a long time, and when I finally did visit the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C., that visit stirred up the feelings even more . . . but I didn't write them out, for a number of reasons, until Byron Tetrick asked if I'd be willing to write something for his anthology—In the Shadow of the Wall—and I knew then that the story had a place.
THE PILOTS
The Sobak Revolt was a long time ago, but I remember my part in it as though it were yesterday. I don't talk about it, Brother Estafen. At least, until now, I didn't, and I won't now. It won't change anything. What happened after the second war with the Sobaks is something else. You 're young for recalling that, for it was little more than ten years after the Revolt. My younger brother Waltar . . . he was a pilot, too, almost as good as I'd been . . . but Vergenya would never have recognised what he did . . . except for the spirits of the Wall. . . except I never told anyone, not even Sereh . . . it's better that way, sometimes, when you really can't explain . . .The summer sun came up like always—above the trees on the east side of the river, rising over the swamps and ruined temples of the ancients, all of them wreathed in the steamy mist that meant the day would be one of those where the sun scorched everything, even subduing the river into a sullen flat expanse of warm water by midafternoon.
Two gunboats were docked at the end of the Navy pier, the canvas on the schooners' masts tied down tight. A smallish Nenglan square-rigger hogged the other pier, and figures began to move across the exposed decks soon after the six bells sounded from the cathedral.
I didn't want to go where I had to, but there was no help for it, and I needed to go before the ferry or the packet docked and I might be called to work, such as it was then.
Waltar had had three rooms to the west, before the War, but Sereh was living in a room smaller than a closet in her sister's cot. Sereh might have been working in the kitchen, but, by the time I climbed the low hill, and the
steps, she was waiting for me, standing in the hot morning on the narrow porch. Holding Syreena in her left arm, Sereh thrust the gray sheet of paper at me with her right. Her eyes were red and puffy.
I couldn't reach it without taking a step forward. In my haste, I was less than careful, and the crutch slipped on the gravel of the path. I staggered, but caught myself, then took the broadsheet from her. It had been folded in thirds and held the stamp of the Council on the outside, along with the bold cursive that bore Sereh's name.
The words blurred as I read them.
"... the pilot Waltar Emmson was not of the Vergen Navy, and his death did not result from enemy fire or attack. Regrettable as it may be, his heirs may not receive death annuities, but only the lump sum payment already received for death by accident. . ."
I didn't need to read more, but I finished the short document.
"Those cables snapped because they were weakened by Sobak cannon . . . you told me that," Sereh said. "I told him not to go. I told him we didn't need the risk bonus." She took a deep breath, looking at me.
A man has to do what he believes he should, or, before long, he has nothing to believe in. I was like that, and Waltar had been that way, too, but I couldn't tell Sereh that, not then, not with Syreena in her arms and another on the way. Not then. "I didn't tell him to go."
She just looked at me with those deep, red-rimmed eyes. "They gave us nothing, except a few duhlars. At least they gave you a position, Arlen."
Position? They had—greeter at the Strangers' House opposite the ferry, and a duhlar a week from the Council. Then, I had no wife. Few wanted to wed a man with but one eye and one good leg, and I'd certainly not wanted to be a burden on anyone.
"Aye, and it's better than begging or working in the almshouse."
"You're alive, Arlen. Waltar isn't." Her words were sharp, but I understood.
"I know. He was a good man, and he was my brother."
"Can't you do something? Can't you make them understand?"
Make them understand what? "We petitioned the Council, Sereh."
"And the Council said no." Her eyes flashed, and even in her anger, I could see why Waltar had asked for her hand. "Can't you do something?"
"I'm not a counselor, and I'm not fancy with my words, Sereh. I was a pilot."
"I'm not mad at you, Arlen. You've stood by me, as well as you can, and . . ." She shook her head.
In time, I had no more words, and I left Sereh, wordless, for what could I say? I made my way back down toward the Strangers' House.
There, under the overhang of the front porch, for a time, I leaned on the crutch and looked out across the river, toward the ruins I knew were on the east shore and could not see through the trees and the mist, though the mist would be gone in the heat of the day when everything simmered under the summer sun.
"Arlen ..." The voice was that of Ryssah.
I didn't turn.
"I heard."
"So has all of Zandra," I replied, still without looking at her. "So have the Brothers and the Council. A few duhlars, a fancy gilt paper, and they think they've done right by Waltar. Half that fleet would have gone down under the Sobak batteries if it hadn't been for him."
